The Empire That Hunts the Sky

Seris Vale escaped Blackcliff on the back of the one dragon the empire swore was only a myth. Black Ember’s bond is alive now—hot, violent, undeniable—so the realm can no longer pretend Seris is a rumor in the mountains. She is real, she is flying, and Halden is watching her the way men watch a problem they intend to turn into a lesson.

The Covenant does not chase her with brute force. It widens the battlefield. It tightens corridors, wards halls, calls cages “safety,” then dares Seris to step into a ritual designed to make her surrender look voluntary. In Blackcliff’s sealed hangars, a magical lattice “monitors” movement like a living net, while Halden and High Marshal Sorr prepare the stabilizing band—the same kind of restraint that turns fear into compliance and pain into silence. Seris refuses. Rhen Calder refuses with her, stepping between her and the men who believe they own the hallway outside her door.

Rhen is the empire’s best weapon, trained for discipline, built for command, dangerous because he understands exactly how the system breaks people. He should be Seris’s handler. Instead he becomes her shield—close enough to burn, close enough to betray, close enough that every look is a risk. What forms between them is not sweet. It is a pact made under pressure, the kind that turns into obsession because it has to mean something to survive.

Black Ember is no longer a chained asset beneath stone. He is a choice. Seris offers him a rider-made band—no lattice key, no doctrine, no leash—and asks him to decide for himself. When the dragon answers, it is not submission. It is invitation. The empire built its power on controlling dragons and controlling people, so a dragon that chooses a rider on his own terms becomes the one thing Halden cannot allow the realm to witness.

With the Covenant closing in, Seris faces an impossible problem: fleeing saves her, but it leaves everyone else inside the machine. Staying might free others, but it could cost the dragon, cost Rhen, cost her autonomy. The deeper she pushes into the fortress that made her, the clearer the truth becomes—Halden doesn’t need to kill her to win. He only needs to control the story, force “consent” to perform, then turn love into a weapon against itself.

The Last Rider of Black Ember is the addictive, high-stakes second installment in a completed romantasy trilogy: dragon rider fantasy, dark fantasy romance tension, oppressive empire politics, brutal slow-burn chemistry, morally gray power, found-family loyalty, and a heroine who refuses to be made manageable. If you love dragon bond romantasy, intense fantasy romance, rebellion fantasy, court-and-command intrigue, and books that escalate harder every chapter, this is the book where the chase becomes war—and the world starts to realize the sky has chosen a side.